While reports today focused on a grisly search for the remains of Jamal Khashoggi in a Turkish forest, one story slipped by relatively unnoticed.

This was an announcement that Donald Trump is to appoint the first US ambassador to Qatar for the first time in 16 months.

The US President could well use Khashoggi’s disappearance as leverage to wrest concessions out of Saudi Arabia on important issues to the West.

For months, Trump has been demanding Saudi Arabia lifts its unjust blockade of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, which has been ongoing since June last year.

Even though his role in kickstarting the crisis is clear, it would appear Trump has since come to realise that it’s wrong and serves only to play directly into Iran’s hands.

But the Saudis have ignored him.

Like they have ignored the rest of the world as it continues to cry out for them to stop their bombing of Yemen, which has left 10,000 dead and 13 million others – or half the population – on the brink of starvation in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Like they ignore the rest of the world when they say that women who campaign for the right to drive or an end to the male guardianship system should not be imprisoned for 25 years despite one young woman Loujain al-Hathloul, who once shared a stage with Meghan Markle at a One Young World summit, is currently facing. 

Like they ignore the cries from campaign groups like Amnesty International and Reprieve for the lives of 14 pro-democracy demonstrators on death row to be spared.

But Trump has an opportunity to call them out. Now is the time for the US President to tell Saudi Arabia: “If you want to be part of the world community, then you abide by certain rules.”

Friendships depend on shared values, as our own foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, put it. The irony is that Saudi Arabia professes to stand up for international law while at the same time trampling over the human rights of thousands of Qataris whose families have been torn apart by the Riyadh-led blockade.

When the boycott was imposed, any Qatari living in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates or Bahrain was sent home – even if married to one of those country’s citizens, as thousands are.

Husbands were separated from their wives and mothers from their children – and it still goes on until this day.

Qatar had to fly in 17,000 cows because its dairy supplies from Saudi Arabia were cut off. Animal rights activists were up in arms when 9,000 camels were kicked out because the Saudis would not let Qatari farmers use their land for grazing, with many dying of starvation at the border.

For the blockade to be lifted, Riyadh made a string of ludicrous demands including the closure of the internationally-respected TV channel, Al Jazeera.

This is because the Qatari channel represented what Jamal Khashoggi cried out for in his last piece for the Washington Post: free expression, something the people of Saudi Arabia are denied.

The Saudis also demanded Qatar sever all links with Iran, despite the tiny Gulf state’s wealth being dependent on the huge natural gas field which it shares with Tehran.

Riyadh was angry that, by having diplomatic relations with the Iranians, it was pursuing an independent foreign policy which the Saudis did not approve of. Qatar rightly maintained that to give this up would be an infringement of its sovereignty.

The impasse has continued to this day, fuelled by an intense jealousy that in four years time the whole world will be beating a path to Qatar’s door as it hosts the 2022 World Cup.

Many believe that if Qatar was stripped of the World Cup, the blockade would end. As the Dubai security chief, Dhahi Khalfan, put it: “If Qatar no longer hosts the World Cup, the crisis will go from Qatar because the crisis was created to end.”

Only now does Trump realise what a bad idea the Saudi-led boycott was, because it drove Doha into the arms of Turkey and Iran, who both airlifted and shipped in food supplies to get around the blockade.

Hopefully this is the reason for the appointment of Mary Phee as America’s new ambassador in Doha.

Could it be that behind the scenes Trump has persuaded the bullying Saudis to call off the boycott so there is a united Arab front ahead of his planned sanctions on Tehran?

Let’s hope so because that would be something which Jamal Khashoggi, a vocal opponent of the blockade, would approve of very much.

Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor at the Daily Mail, and former Head of News and US Editor at Daily Mirror